The War of Two Queens (Blood and Ash 4)

Rattled by his reaction, my stomach knotted with dread. “What is it?” I asked, seeing that Arden had stopped once more.

“Dear gods,” Naill uttered, jerking back on his saddle at whatever he saw, his deep brown skin taking on a grayish pallor. His horror was so potent it scratched against my shields like bitter claws.

When there was no answer, trepidation grew, encompassing my entire being. I eased Setti forward between Kieran and Naill, to where the Massene Rise gates were visible through the pines.

At first, I couldn’t make sense of what I saw—the cross-like shapes hanging from the massive gates.

Dozens of them.

My breathing turned ragged. Eather thrummed in my tightening chest. Bile crept up my throat. I jerked back. Before I lost my balance and toppled from the saddle, Naill’s arm snapped out, catching my shoulder.

Those shapes were…

Bodies.

Men and women stripped bare, impaled at the wrists and feet to Massene’s iron and limestone gates, their bodies displayed for any to look upon—

Their faces…

Dizziness rushed me. Their faces weren’t bare. They were all shrouded in the same veil I had been forced to wear, held in place by gold chains gleaming dully in the moonlight.

A storm of rage replaced the disbelief as Setti’s reins slipped from my fingers. Eather, the Primal essence of the gods that flowed through all the many different bloodlines, throbbed in my chest. Far stronger in me because what was inside me came from Nyktos, the King of Gods. The essence merged with icy-hot fury as I stared at the bodies, my chest heaving with too-shallow, too-quick breaths. A thin metallic taste coated the inside of my mouth as I looked behind the horror on the gate, to the tops of the distant spiral towers, each a stained ivory against the rapidly darkening sky.

Above, the pines began trembling, showering us with thin needles. And that anger, the horror at what I saw, built and built until the corners of my vision turned silver.

My gaze shifted to those who walked the battlements of the Rise, on either side of the gate where the bodies of fellow mortals were so cruelly displayed, and what filled my mouth, clogged my throat, came from within me. It was shadowy and smoky and a little sweet, rolling across my tongue, and it came from a place deep inside me. This cold, aching hollowness that had woken in the last twenty-three days.

It tasted like the promise of retribution.

Of wrath.

And death.

I tasted death as I watched the Rise Guards stop mere feet from the bodies to speak to one another, laughing at something that was said. My gaze narrowed on them as the essence pulsed in my chest, and my will rose. A sharp gust of wind, colder than a winter’s morning, rolled across the Rise, lifting the hems of the veils and whipping around the guards on the wall, sending several sliding back toward the edge.

They stopped laughing then, and I knew the smiles I couldn’t see faded.

“Poppy.” Kieran leaned from his saddle, clasping the nape of my neck beneath the thick braid. “Calm. You need to find calm. If you do something now before we know exactly how many are on the Rise, it will alert them to our presence. We must wait.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to calm, but Kieran was right. If we wanted to take Massene with minimal loss of life—those innocents who lived inside the walls and were routinely turned into Craven and hung from the gates—I needed to get control of my emotions and abilities.

And I could.

If I wanted to.

In the past weeks, I’d spent a lot of time on the Primal notam, working with the wolven to see how much distance we could put between us and still be able to communicate. Other than Kieran, I’d had the most success with Delano, whom I could reach deep within the Wastelands through the notam. But I’d also focused on harnessing the eather so that what I pictured in my mind became my will and was carried out by the energy instantaneously.

So I could fight like a god.

Fisting my hands, I willed the eather away. It took every part of my being to stop myself from allowing the promise of death to flow out from me.

“You okay?” Kieran asked.

“No.” I swallowed. “But I’m in control.” I looked at Naill. “Are you okay?”

The Atlantian shook his head. “I can’t understand how anyone is capable of doing such a thing.”

“Neither can I.” Kieran looked past me to Naill as Arden backed away from the tree line. “I think it’s good that we can’t.”

I forced my attention to the battlements along the top of the wall. I couldn’t look too long at the bodies. I couldn’t allow myself to really think about them. Just like I couldn’t allow myself to think about what he was going through—what was being done to him.